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posted by martyb on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the lets-party-like-its-1999 dept.

MP3 decoding was already free and got recently included in Fedora. But now, encoding is also free according to Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS: "On April 23, 2017, Technicolor's mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated." The Wikipedia MP3 article confirms that.

So, do you still use an MP3 library or have you switched to another format or means of listening to music such as (spying built-in) streaming services?


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:03AM (13 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:03AM (#504133)

    You're living in the past. Standalone MP3 decoder chips have long been obsolete. Any decent phone these days has a CPU running Linux and doesn't need or use special decoders for audio.

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:14AM (10 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:14AM (#504138) Journal

    You don't own any phone, your government and operator just let you physically posses it. There's a untrusted operating system and radiomodem so there are issues with those devices. Another one is ultra low power use for long trips.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:46AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @03:46AM (#504155)

      You don't own land either. You pay rent in the form of property tax and the government can evict you by eminent domain.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:43AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:43AM (#504183)

        Tell it, bro! All government is theft!

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:32AM (7 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:32AM (#504178)

      What in the hell are you ranting about? We're talking about audio codecs here, not some insane conspiracy theory BS. The government doesn't care what songs you listen to. Modern devices do not use dedicated MP3 decoder chips any more; those chips were always problematic and didn't play a lot of MP3 files. You can get embedded micros these days for next to nothing that run full Linux distros: see the Raspberry Pi.

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:44AM (6 children)

        by kaszz (4211) on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:44AM (#504184) Journal

        There is a lot of other issues than song playing going on in a smartphone. You do know about Snowden?

        Most embedded micros don't support MMU which result in a hard limit on what OS you can run. This means that source code for the codec becomes important to actually make the device play. And more complicated processors with MMU requires usually chips that are messy to handle in comparison. Power usage also goes up.

        • (Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:32AM (5 children)

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:32AM (#504200)

          You're still missing the fact that no one uses any such devices in 2017. You're talking about ancient circa-2000 MP3 players that use such hardware. No one cares about non-MMU micros any more. No one uses those to play MP3s. There are no devices on sale now like this which have any significant sales volume.

          • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:14PM (4 children)

            by cafebabe (894) on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:14PM (#504369) Journal

            I agree that a general purpose CPU with MMU is useful or even beneficial for playing audio from one or more compressed formats. I also agree that alternatives don't have significant sales volume. However, some of the audiophile equipment currently available is instructive. For example, 7.1 surround sound digital speakers would benefit from the barest and most timing-accurate CPU. This gets particularly important if 22.2 surround sound or Sennheiser's 25 speaker arrangement are considered. This isn't mainstream at present but current assumptions could limit wider adoption.

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            • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:27PM (3 children)

              by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:27PM (#504376)

              I'm sorry, I still don't see what you're getting at. No one is going to go back to MP3 decoder ASICs when you can get general-purpose CPUs for so little money that have no trouble running a software decoder. And audiophile stuff is really irrelevant to the larger music market; if it weren't, the Apple store wouldn't exist and no one would be buying 320k MP3s online. Instead, everyone is now either buying MP3s, Apple music, or using a streaming service which is even worse quality than those two. CD sales have gotten rather poor in the face of these newer alternatives.

              Digital speakers don't need a lossy codec decoder at all; that's just a good way to introduce more latency into the system, which with a multi-speaker setup is going to sound audibly bad. It'd make much more sense to do the decoding and signal processing in a single unit, then send the decoded audio data (as PCM) to each speaker separately along with a timing signal so all the speakers can be synchronized.

              • (Score: 3, Interesting) by cafebabe on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:22PM (2 children)

                by cafebabe (894) on Thursday May 04 2017, @05:22PM (#504411) Journal

                I'm envisioning a semi-hypothetical system which is base on Meridian Audio's digital speakers. Each speaker recieves a serial stream and contains its own amplifier(s). The traditional hi-fi selector/amplifier unit is relegated to a selector/sampler/transcoder/expander/reverb for eight or more speakers. It would be convenient if the intermediate format to the speakers was sigma-delta format rather than PCM because this would provide the best dynamic range for analog sources, such as vinyl records, cassette tape and radio. Sigma-delta format is hugely verbose and uncompressible when used as a music storage format. (See Super Audio Compact Disc.) However, it works very well between "amp" and speakers. Within each speaker, the process is to decode received bits sequentially where zero means decrement by one voltage level and one means increment by one voltage level. This incurs the obvious problem that there is a maximum gradient which can be encoded accurately but this is functionally equivalent to the maximum swing voltage of operational amplifiers or suchlike.

                The speaker requires minimal processing power to maintain a running total. The most advanced part of the speaker is dropping the running total into a one bit DAC which is likely to operate above 1GHz and may utilize Chinese Remainder Theorem to count accurately at this speed.

                You are correct to be concerned about phasing. When this was first described to me by one of Meridian's engineers, I was concerned that crystals being out of phase would lead to soundstage rotation. This is true but rotation is extremely small and therefore completely inperceptible. Headphones are an entirely different matter and that discussion led to a job offer.

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                • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday May 05 2017, @12:07AM (1 child)

                  by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday May 05 2017, @12:07AM (#504598)

                  So what does all this have to do with whether it's viable to encode your music library with something other than MP3?

                  • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Friday May 05 2017, @03:03AM

                    by cafebabe (894) on Friday May 05 2017, @03:03AM (#504655) Journal

                    Your position was that the majority of compressed audio is decoded using a CPU with an MMU. I concur. However, if maximum quality is desired and the number of audio channels is large (5.1 surround, 7.1 surround, 22.2 surround) then the use of CPUs without MMU becomes increasingly cost effective.

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  • (Score: 2) by tonyPick on Thursday May 04 2017, @06:07AM

    by tonyPick (1237) on Thursday May 04 2017, @06:07AM (#504215) Homepage Journal

    doesn't need or use special decoders for audio

    A Very Minor Nitpick - most will contain specialised HW to support audio & multimedia decoding, and specific codec libraries to exploit that are fairly common - https://developer.arm.com/technologies/dsp [arm.com]

    You're completely right in your point though: This is generalised HW acceleration, and not tied to a specific codec...

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:26AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday May 04 2017, @09:26AM (#504254) Journal
    As the other poster pointed out, you're not quite right. We haven't needed dedicated MP3 decoders for a long time (even the original iPad didn't have one) for performance, but you really don't want to be doing audio playback on a general-purpose ARM core if you value your battery. When a phone is playing music, it typically wakes up the CPU, loads a track into RAM, kicks the DSP and then sends the CPU back to sleep. The DSP uses around 10% of the power of the CPU to decode the audio and will stream it from RAM to the ADC or Bluetooth device.
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